> The opposite case is not true though. If you had studied the word 你好, but had never studied the individual characters and then added them to your queue, your Queue browser would be empty.

Can this behaviour be changed? Sometimes a word and the characters it is composed of have different, unrelated meanings and I more importantly, I don't want to only know how to write a particular character when it comes after another character.

It's not a huge deal as context eventually (usually) becomes clear when the word is used in other places. I would rather have characters automatically added as words were added (or at least the option!)

Hmm, I think that part of the userguide needs more clarification.

When you add the word '那个' to your queue, the items for '那' and '个' are also added to the queue, but deactivated so they aren't visible in the queue. At this point, if you added '那' or '个' to your queue, you would see them too, because that would activate them.

If you hadn't added the individual characters, just the word, then when the visible '那个' items go from queue to study, the '那' and '个' items that aren't visible also leave the queue, but are not studied because they aren't set to be studied. So at this point if you add '那' and '个' they won't show up in your queue, they will simply be activated and start being studied normally, because they have already been added.

Kind of obscure, and not really well shown by the design of the queue or the widget for adding to the queue. But the point is adding individual characters to your queue does cause them to be studied.

Though there's also the case of adding words from lists. If you add individual words manually and you also want to add the individual characters of those words, expand the list browser to show the characters, then you can select them before pressing add.

The only way currently you can't add individual characters is adding from lists automatically. As words are added from lists only the words are added (with deactivated items for the characters, like with the queue). We could add a vocabulary option that causes it to activate individual characters as words are added from lists. Is this something you would like?

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Scott, although I'm still a bit puzzled by the whole activated/deactivated concept. I guess I don't really understand how something can be in your queue (or in your review list), but not be active. Does that mean you'll never see it in reviews? And if so, how does that differ from not having it in your queue/review list at all?

But ultimately, though, your final suggestion ("we could add a vocabulary option that causes it to activate individual characters as words are added from lists") sounds like exactly what I've been looking for for a while. When I encounter new characters in a word, I almost always want to learn the individual characters, also. In fact I prefer to first learn the new characters in isolation before dealing with them in the context of a word. Because of this, I've been managing most of my content on my own through the list widget. Having an option to auto-add individual characters would be terrific (as long as it applied across the board - to words you add through the widget, words you select manually from lists, and words that are automatically added from lists).

Yeah, there are a few levels that are going on at once.

Active/inactive: This just determines if it can come up as part of the study process by itself or not. But even an inactive item can be updated, if it's studied as part of a larger item. When you delete an item, you actually deactivate it from study; we keep the progress you've made on it.

Queued/not queued: This is just to keep track of what has been added manually and needs to be added to study gradually. Items you're already studying don't go back into the queue. So if you add an inactive item, it still goes into the queue, because it's feasible for you to activate it after you've added it to the queue. And so if we added inactive items straight to practice, you could end up adding far too many items at once to practice.

It's a really unlikely scenario, but it could happen so that's the way we do it.

Alright then, it shouldn't be too hard to add, so I'll do that soon. The code's kind of in a state of flux right now though so when the custom list builder is up, that's when I'll work on it.